It Hit Me Like a Ton of Bricks

                        The expression “It hit me like a ton of bricks” means that some thought took you by surprise, or caught you unawares. My idea for The Proper Pillow definitely hit me like a ton of bricks. Here is an excerpt from my book, Good Night, Sleep Right: Your Guide to Avoiding Common Sleep Injuries, due out early 2015:

So this guy walks into my office and says, “Doc, I think I slept wrong last night.”

This sentence sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but it’s actually way more serious. It’s the phrase that impacted my entire professional life. Around 2007, I noticed that most of my patients were coming into my office, rubbing their necks/wrists/backs/elbows and saying the same thing: “I think I slept wrong last night.”

Instead of immediately answering back, “Okay, show me where it hurts,” and running a series of tests to diagnose the type and extent of the injury, I would ask them, “What do you mean?”

That question unleashed of a litany of complaints, from the pillow, to the mattress, to the temperature of the room, to issues and stresses at work all the way down to a bad bit of meat before bed. Since when did all of my patients turn into The Princess and the Pea?I thought.

It was after looking for a pillow that would help my patients and becoming more and more frustrated with every one of them coming up short, that the idea to make my own pillow seriously hit me like a ton of bricks. We are making an infomercial for the Proper Pillow, also due out early 2015, and decided to play on the expression “hit me like a ton of bricks.” The idea: If you sleep incorrectly, you wake up and “feel like you’ve been hit by a ton of bricks.” Envision TV is producing the infomercial. Here are some pictures we took during the filming of me, in my own bed. [popup url= https://www.dropbox.com/sh/pt5ng7a6xcxh9eo/AAC38oGIw3zIpMq1aU9S3VX6a/20141215_135200.mp4?dl=0]This is a little outtake, too.[/popup] We will have the infomercial and the book available on the site when they are finished.